Supermarket AI Offers Mom's Famous Mustard Gas Recipe
Supermarket AI Offers Mom's Famous Mustard Gas Recipe
An AI from a New Zealand grocery chain gave one user a recipe for an “Aromatic Water Mix” that included bleach and ammonia as ingredients.
It's chloramine, not mustard gas. The latter has sulfur in it, which neither bleach nor ammonia contain.
And it didn't exactly offer it, as in "why don't you try this?" The AI was set up so you could give it some ingredients and it would make up recipes that used those ingredients.
New Zealand political commentator Liam Hehir wrote on Twitter that he asked the Pak‘nSave bot to create a recipe that only included water, ammonia and bleach
When you mix ammonia and bleach you get chloramine, the AI was basically told to make a recipe that would produce that.
Just like most stories these days about AI doing some weird shit, it's almost always because it was explicitly instructed to do weird shit.
True but when most people put a few ingredients into a search engine, they usually get a recipe that uses most (but not necessarily all) of the ingredients. If you used "ammonia bleach recipe" as search terms in a search engine, you would not get any results for drinkable recipes, likely just articles and blog posts with warnings on not to mix them. The people using the AI recipe bot probably started out using it like a search engine but must have noticed that it will use all ingredients no matter how disharmonious, then started to test how bad the bot really was, pushing it to absurd levels.
The real story is that it creates recipes using all suggested ingredients (a serious bug) and they are all crap - it's useless.
Permanently Deleted
So, we're just adding AI shit everywhere just because now? Is this some kind of "me too" game that corporations are playing? The amount of times in the past 4 years I have needed an AI to help me out with anything at all has been exactly zero, unless you count making stupid images on Bing for shits and giggles.
Businesses run on Investor/Shareholder dreams, and they dream about the next newest bullshit to make money. Thats why Crypto and Blockchain got so big a few years ago.
Grocery stores are always trying new things hoping it'll be the next big thing, but usually it doesn't catch on.
When I was a kid back in the 1980s and '90s, they would add a small digital calculator to the handle of the shopping cart to help people figure out how much they were spending. It wasn't useful to people, so it disappeared.
Then they used to have the live lobster tank back in the deli. Turns out, most people don't want to buy live lobster at a budget grocery store in a working class neighborhood.
Then around 2000, stores started expanding significantly to become a One-Stop shop. Bragging that you could buy a pair of shoes and fresh produce all in one place. It sounded kind of stupid, but it caught on in a huge way! Walmart have been the best at implementing this model, but others like Fred Meyer did it first.
Then they started to implement the curbside pickup. Which was totally dead and nobody used it in an absolute failure..... Until the pandemic hit, and a bunch of people tried it, and realized they liked it.
So the next thing? Sounds like goofing around with AI in their app. Will it be useful? Guess we'll have to wait and see.
Holy shit I remember those calculators, thanks for unlocking a distant memory of trying to spell words in it upside down while my mom shopped.
Damn kids and their skateboards
AIs like these have only been available for less than a year, so I'm not sure why you used a four-year timeframe.
If these AIs aren't useful to you then don't use them. It's not unreasonable to be exploring these options, though, since these AIs are a new capability. It makes sense to experiment with new capabilities to see whether they can make things easier.
man, not even Stephen King imagined supermarket robots trying to tell grandma to go home and accidentally off herself with mustard gas
If grandma asks for a recipe using the ingredients ammonia, bleach and water then maybe if she ends up offing herself it wasn't an accident.
Maybe the bot isn't too useful but acting surprised or horrified because if you give it a list a crazy ingredients you get a recipe using the crazy ingredients you provided is kind of weird. This article is basically clickbait.
Even that Bachman-guy is still not that vile.
aromatic adjective ar·o·mat·ic ˌa-rə-ˈma-tik ˌer-ə- 1 : of, relating to, or having aroma: a : having a noticeable and pleasant smell : FRAGRANT aromatic herbs aromatic wines b : having a strong smell The peat burns with a pungently aromatic smoke. c : having a distinctive quality
I mean... If we are going with definition 1.b... It's not wrong. It is an aromatic water mixture. It's just not an aroma that you want.
Peggy Hill bout to file the first copyright suit.
Yumm, just like grandma used to make (before she killed the rest of the family)!
Mum used to make this for us when we were too poor for actual mustard.